Analysis of Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 1, 2025

Sir Walter Scott based his novel The Bride of Lammermoor, second in his Tales of My Landlord series, on a true tragic love story about a Scottish family named Dalrymple, supported by fictional accounts, poetry, and popular ballad versions. He did not reveal his sources at its first printing, but included it in a later edition, explaining that he had not done so in the first edition for fear of causing offense to Dalrymple family members and others involved.

However, upon later discovering through a friend’s help the account in print in a publication titled Notes to Law’s Memorials, and also in a reprint of “the Reverend Mr. Symson’s poems appended to the Large Description of Galloway,” Scott felt he could relate the true story and identify its participants.

One James Dalrymple, from a Scottish family containing men of “talent, civil and military, and of literary, political, and professional eminence,” married Margaret Ross, “an able, politic and high-minded woman.” When she died, she ordered that her coffin stand erect at the head of her grave, promising that as long as it did so, her descendants would “continue to flourish.” Such “necromancy” became an important aspect of the fable regarding the “unaccountable and melancholy” events that would befall a future elder daughter of the family, headed by Lord Stair and his wife.

Janet Dalrymple engaged herself in secret to one Lord Rutherford, whom her parents found unacceptable due either to “his political principles or his want of fortune.” To confirm their love pact, the couple shattered a gold coin, each keeping half. When another suitor acceptable to her parents, named David Dunbar, proposed shortly thereafter to Janet, she rejected the proposal and confessed her secret engagement, infuriating her parents.

Her mother insisted that she marry Dunbar, son and heir to David Dunbar of Baldoon, in Wigtonshire; her father feared contradicting his wife and agreed. When Rutherford mailed a letter protesting the new arrangement, Lady Stair answered that her daughter had decided to honor her duty to her parents, and that her marriage to Dunbar would proceed. Rutherford traveled to the Stair estate, at which point Janet told him that she was breaking their engagement, with Lady Stair as witness.

When Rutherford protested, Lady Stair called upon Levitical law based on a passage from the biblical book of Numbers that declared that a father could break a vow on the part of his daughter, and that God would forgive the daughter the unfortunate vow. Despite Rutherford’s pleading that Janet declare her own wishes, she remained mute, only holding out her half of the gold coin to restore to her lover. He left in a great passion, never to be heard from again, although according to Scott, his birth date supported the fact that he was the last Lord Rutherford, who died in 1685.

The marriage plans continued, with no protest from Janet Dalrymple. On the wedding night, “hideous shrieks” issued from the nuptial chamber. When the family investigated, they found the groom stabbed multiple times close to the door and Janet crouched near the fireplace, “mopping and mowing . . . in a word, absolutely insane.” Scott reported that her only words were “Take up your bonny bridegroom.” Two weeks later, Janet died. Dunbar recovered, but he would not share any details of the incident.

The official record to which Scott referred stated that Stair’s daughter, “being married, the night she was bride in, was taken from her bridegroom and harled through the house (by spirits, we are given to understand) and afterward died.”

In Scott’s novel, Lord Rutherford becomes Edgar, the master of Ravenswood, a young man who inherits the “pride and turbulence,” but not the fortune of his house. Due to ill luck, Edgar’s father, Alan Lord Ravenswood, had to dispose of Castle Ravenswood and his estate. Sir William Ashton and his wife, who hailed from a more distinguished family than that of her husband, demand certain conditions with the sale, causing a violent disagreement with Ravenswood; their dealings hasten his death.

Ashton then insults Edgar Ravenswood by sending his agent with his legal claim to the land to Lord Alan’s funeral. Edgar returns to the castle following the observance of rights for his father, and Scott sets the melancholy tone for the novel by writing of Alan’s home, “But its space was peopled by phantoms which the imagination of the young heir conjured up before him—the tarnished honour and degraded fortunes of his house.”

The following day, Ashton declares Edgar’s fate to be in his hands, and the young man shall either “bend or break.” The statement provides ominous foreshadowing.

With the quarrel standing between the Ravenswoods and the Ashtons, the new Lord Ravenswood falls passionately in love with the story’s Janet figure, the beautiful Lucy Ashton, his inherited enemy’s daughter. Her description matches that of the prototypical romance heroine, with golden hair “divided on a brow of exquisite whiteness,” which the narrator compares to sunshine on snow. The novel teems with such predictable romance imagery, enjoyable, nevertheless, for its skillful use by Scott.

The innocence and purity symbolized by the white imagery will soon be challenged. The love that Lucy returns to Edgar stands doomed by the ongoing feud between his family and hers. As with all star-crossed lovers caught up in an inherited feud, their relationship can only end disastrously. Lady Ashton opposes the marriage and tricks her daughter into marrying the Laird of Bucklaw.

In typical romance fashion, incorporating mistaken identity and misunderstandings, Lady Ashton fabricates a story convincing Lucy that Ravenswood has rejected her. When Ravenswood reappears following the marriage and demands revenge on the groom, Lucy murders her husband. Declared insane, she dies shortly thereafter.

Scott includes topics additional to that of romance. He begins his story by expounding on the fate of artists, who become quite successful or die in poverty; there exists no “in between” state for the true artist. When the artist character of Dick Tinto tells the novel’s first-person narrator, Peter Pattieson, that for the writer, “words were his colours, and, if properly employed, they could not fail to place the scene which he wished to conjure up as effectually before the mind’s eye as the tablet or canvas presents it to the bodily organ,” readers understand that Scott comments on his own occupation as an author.

Dick proceeds to advise Peter that too much “conversation” in a scene will cause readers to lose interest and represents a lack of imagination, and Scott seems to advise his fellow writers in technique. When Dick produces a painting that represents the tale of Janet Dalrymple, along with a few notes regarding the story, Peter decides to record the history, using both the painting and the words on the notes. Scott’s message regarding the importance of one art form to another remains clear.

Like many of Scott’s works, the novel, and the introduction describing Scott’s multiple sources, became available in electronic text in the 20th century.

Bibliography

Project Gutenberg. Introduction to The Bride of Lammermoor, by Sir Walter Scott. Project Gutenberg. Available online. URL: http://ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext96/brlam10.txt. Posted March 1996.

Scott, Sir Walter. The Bride of Lammermoor. Edited by Fiona Robertson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Wilt, Judith. The Novels of Sir Walter Scott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.